


Music

by jmflowers



Category: Emmerdale
Genre: F/F, Second Person, back to what I usually write for them, character exploration, more feelings than plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-17
Updated: 2019-03-17
Packaged: 2019-11-21 06:20:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18138548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jmflowers/pseuds/jmflowers
Summary: Vanessa discovers something upon moving in with Charity: she plays music.





	Music

**Author's Note:**

> Ah, backwards I go to that comfortable little place where everything is written in second person verse and plot is completely irrelevant. 
> 
> I just needed to clear the thought from my head.

Charity plays music. 

It’s not something you would’ve guessed you were going to discover upon moving in with her, not one of the weird little habits you’d been imagining as you’d unpacked your stuff. You’d thought the months of co-habiting back and forth between the Woolpack and Tug Ghyll had successfully unraveled most of the idiosyncrasies of both your existences. But she surprises you still, in a million little ways that seem to matter just as much as the grand gestures. 

It’s a slow discovery, one that slinks out in the tiniest bits and pieces. There’s the little melody that drifts under the closed door as she showers before dressing for the day, the twinkle of something you vaguely recognize as she putters around the kitchen making herself a brew. There are gentle rises and falls that keep her company on the mornings she slips downstairs to meet the drayman, when all the rest of the world is silent and dark and still. They float and drift around her like a cloud, wisps of something you long to grab hold of and carefully analyze, settling somewhere just beyond your reach. 

The Charity in your mind had been much more stationary, if you’re honest with yourself, much more like the one you’d seen on the nights during the trial; when she’d clutched at a glass of wine and your skin and the room had been loud with her thoughts without either of you saying a word. You’d thought she was pensive, perhaps, on her evenings alone, that she sat back on the couch with a drink and an idea and let it stew. That she flipped channels, maybe, or put on a box set like she does on evenings with you. It’s absurd, really, to have imagined her small and quiet. Your Charity is more often loud and exciting, more dimensional than she is sometimes given credit for - even by you. 

But Charity Dingle doesn’t sit back and wait for the world to come after her. No, Charity Dingle fills the spaces with adventure and schemes and hilarity and music. 

Once you figure out that’s what she’s doing, you begin to notice it in places you hadn’t before. You learn to match the tune with her mood, not too unlike that ring that had adorned your finger every day for almost a year, until your skin was as green as the grass in the back garden and your mother had insisted you take it off. 

There are bouncing pop beats when there’s a jumble inside her head, addicting tempos that loosen her limbs and seem to momentarily quiet the scrambling mess of her thoughts. They are the songs you remember her playing in the pub, ones she’d used to irritate punters huddled and brooding in corner booths, pretending she didn’t see the ones who started to sing along. They’re catchy and repetitive, songs you hear on the radio in your car, ones that sneak into the back of your mind to replay themselves when you’re trying to focus on work. 

She travels backwards in time when she’s feeling something more akin to joy, songs you remember singing into a hairbrush in your childhood bedroom, when you were certain you could be a pop star if someone just gave you a chance. You wonder, distantly, if she has memories like that - of being young and carefree and safe, of believing everything was possible. Chas sings along sometimes when she plays those songs, the two of them dancing around the sitting room like they’re not a day over fourteen. You think, then, that maybe the memories she’s making now are better - grown and carefree and knowing she’s loved. 

The music slows down when the sky begins to darken, when the stars gather just beyond the window and she perches her phone on the dresser. There are ballads when the lights are low, gentle crooning as she strips the day from her skin and slips the weight of the world off her shoulders. She sways slowly in the centre of your bedroom, her body unconsciously moving to the softest of beats. 

You can’t help but wrap yourself around her then, to slide your hands into the curve at the small of her back and nestle your head into the crook where her neck meets shoulder. You can clearly remember the one, two, three of the waltz step and the feel of a teenage boy’s sweaty palm in your own. Your mother had told you that one day you’d want to know how to dance, that one day it would feel romantic and special to be guided around a dance floor by a handsome young man, that it would matter whether you knew to let him lead. 

It feels more romantic and special to shift your weight from side to side in Charity’s arms, your feet never moving, the four walls of your bedroom drifting from your vision until all that’s left is you and her and the steady heartbeat thrumming away beneath your ear. You want to pull her closer, in those moments, want to hold her tighter. You want to grasp every bit of her in the safety net of your arms, tucked away from a world that doesn’t understand her in all the ways you want to, protected from a life that makes her sharp and bitter and still. You want to lose yourself in the soft murmur of her voice as she sings along, want to tip right over into her until you exist as one. You want nothing else beyond that bedroom door, nothing else but this remarkable woman who lets you be privy to these puzzle pieces of her identity. 

You opt for squeezing your arms tighter around her middle, nuzzling against the base of her throat when she sighs and the breath flutters across the top of your head. You sway with her long after one song ends and another begins, losing track of the fades and crescendos that fit between them. She rubs feather light hands down your spine, whispers of a touch you crave with a near constant aching. 

There is a soundtrack to Charity Dingle: timpani that swells and grows like the bursting seams of her anger, trilling flutes that dip and swirl as careful as the trembling edges of her uncertainty. There’s a violin that lifts and rises and builds and fits as precisely as the rare glimpse of her genuine happiness. Clarinet sits steady beneath the melody, oboe flitting in and out like the dark edges of memories you’ll never be ready to name. You can hear saxophones and violas and cellos and one beautiful double bass, trumpets and piccolos and what you think might be a bassoon. They fit and crash and come together and break apart again, this cacophonic symphony of her life. 

Yes, Charity Dingle plays music and that piece of her is like music to your soul.


End file.
